I set up a news feed from http://www.veganporn.com/syndicate-j.pl The XML looks OK, but I always get no articles. I poked in import.module and found that standalone "textarea" and "image" tags were not dealt with properly. Here's my fix:

+     $data = ereg_replace("<textinput([^s].*)/>", "", $data);
      $data = ereg_replace("<textinput([^s].*)</textinput>", "", $data);

This worked for a machine running PHP 4.0.6, but when I applied the same fix to a machine running PHP 4.1.2, it doesn't work. A little more investigation found that this line:

eregi("<item([^s].*)</item>", $data, $data);

ends up with $data[0] containing "<", which I figured out was the first char in the incoming XML.

With that, my meager PHP skills have been exausted.